Oracle Role for User Administration

Question

Hello,
I am a DBA. We have a separate group that maintains oracle user accounts within an oracle database. We would like that group to maintain users (add/remove users from database, add/remove roles, etc.) but we do not want to give them the 'DBA' role for security reasons. Ideally, we want to grant them a role that gives them the ability to administer users but not do anything else.
Does a role like this exist within Oracle? If not is there a workaround to obtain this type of functionality?
Thank you!

Answer 1

Do you have this actually working? I have it complaining about permissions on the line that tries to create the user. I thought oracle restricted doing this for security reasons. I am creating this as a user with the 'DBA' role and then when I try to execute it as the same user (which can create users normally) I get this error:
SQL> exec system.create_user('troy1','troy1');
BEGIN system.create_user('troy1','troy1'); END;
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01031: insufficient privileges
ORA-06512: at "SYSTEM.CREATE_USER", line 4
ORA-06512: at line 1
And here is the code (based off of the example)...
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE create_user( p_username IN VARCHAR2, p_password IN VARCHAR2 )
AS
BEGIN
EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'CREATE USER ' || p_username || ' IDENTIFIED BY ' || p_password || ' DEFAULT TABLESPACE users ';
END;
Any ideas?